-Scientific visualization software uses shapes, location in space, color, brightness, and motion to help us visualize data.
-Visualization helps researches see relationships that might have been obscure or even impossible to grasp without computer-aided visualization tools.
-Computer modeling: uses computers to create abstract models of objects, organisms, organizations, and processes.
-Examples of popular computer models:
- Games
- models of organisms, objects and organizations.
- Flight simulators and simulations of science lab activities.
- Business, city, or nation management simulations.
- Computer simulations are widely used
There are many reasons:
- Safety
- Economy
- Projection
- Visulization
- Replication
-GIGO Revisited:
-the accuracy of a simulation depends on how closely its mathematical model corresponds to the system being simulated.
- Some models suffer from faulty assumptions.
- Some models contain hidden assumptions that may not even be obvious to their creators.
-Some models go astry simply becasue of clerical or human errors.
-Still, garbage in, garbage out is a basic rule simulation.
Making reality Fit the machine
-Some simulations are so comlex that researchers need to simplify models and streamline calculations to get them to run on the best hardware available.
-Sometimes this simplification of reality is deliberate; more often its unconscious.
- Either way, information can be lost, and the loss may comprmoise the integrity of the simulation and call the results into question.
The illusion of Infallibility:
- A computer simulation, whether generated by a PC spreadsheet or churned out by a supercomputer, can be an invaluable decisionmaking aid.
- The is that the people who make decisions with computers will turn over too much of their decision-making power to the computer.
- Risks can be magnifies because peoeple take computers seriously.
-Future user interfaces will be based on agents rather than on tools.
-Agents are software programs designed to be managed rather than munipulated.
-An intelligent software agent can:
- Ask questions as well as respond to commands.
- Pay attention to its user's work patterns.
- Serve as a guide and a coach.
- Take on its owner's goals.
- Use reasoning to fabricate goals of its own.
Tomorrow's agents will be better able to complete with human assistants.
Future agents may possess a degree of sensitivity.
A well trained software agent in the future might accomplish these tasks:
-Remind you that its time to get the trues rotated on your car and make an appointement for the rotation.
-Distribute notes to the other members of your study group or work group and tell you which members opened those notes.
-Keep you poted on new articles on subjects that interest you and know enough about those subjects to be selective without being rigid.
-Manage your appointments and keep track of your communications.
-Teach you new applications and answer reference questions.
-Defend your system and your home from viruses, intruders, and other security breaches.
-Help protect your privacy on and off the net.
